Thanks for all the help so far...
I'm taking 'patio's advice and using a disk adapter to transfer the files from my (Toshiba) laptop's hard drive to an external USB hard drive (Western Digital).
I had tried the MS Dos 'xcopy' command, but the files didn't all copy over, and the ones that did had some strange permission attributes. I even had a tough time deleting them off of the external drive (cyclic redundancy errors and "system file" warnings). I had been worried about a virus, and when I ran my copy of McAffe on the drive it found three problems, but they looked more like adware to me.
I have more questions now...
- I'm using my desktop to transfer the files from my laptop HDD to the external USB drive. After running antivirus scan, I opened the "My Documents" folder and was able to see my files. When I first tried to copy files between drives, I got errors saying I didn't have permission to open "My Documents".
The file transfer seems to be going alright, but what can I do about the permission problem? Will this affect my transfer of files?
Thanks,
Tom